One school of legal scholarship posits that civil laws arose not so much from religious or geographical influences, but from a collection of folk stories that put into statute that what was previously only told as local legends: quite literally, law from folk-lore.
A logical deduction from this proposition is that the language of the law (considered by some to be archaic and cumbersome) was actually, in its time, a simple and modern way of conveying information. As language has distilled, and some would argue devolved, the text of statutes has remained to a degree unyielding. For example, some real estate contracts still say "the party of the first part" and the "party of the second part", rather than "buyer" and "seller."
Able litigators, then, have traditionally been able to convert the complexity of legal speak to an accessible, plain-meaning narrative that "regular folks" could understand and appreciate. This benevolently high-handed thinking is why many a hand has been wrung over the so-called "CSI effect", which posits that jurors are so conditioned by the special effects on episodic TV police procedurals that that they become unnecessarily skeptical of current police procedures which do not necessarily result in an "Aha!" moment, highlighted by jarring guitar riffs.
How then does one attempt to retain the attention of the fact-finder without sacrificing the nuance and complexity of language? In other words, how can you refer someone to the statutory language (and expect them to form a conclusion) if they are likely to zone out reading it halfway through? Clarence Darrow was said to have given a two-day closing argument once; it would be hard to imagine even the most polished orator today holding court for 16 hours straight.
One can only imagine legal historians a century hence poring over the documents of the next crop of famous lawyers, in the dawn of the age of Twitter and text-messages. A bail application in fifteen years may sound something like this: "Hai Juj! plz dnt throw my klient in teh jailz! Kthxbai!" Lose a verdict? No worries, just tweet out: "O noes! Jurors + Juj = WTF?" Want to settle a case and look tough to an adversary: "Gimme dis $$ or else we iz pressing chrgz!"
I would continue this column, but, hey look, Angry Birds!
